meanwhile, present one from the year 1820, and leave the reader to form his own estimate of it: 'The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams--a music of preparation and of awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like _that_, gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day--a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where--somehow, I knew not how--by some beings, I knew not whom--a battle, a strife, an agony, was conducting--was evolving like a great drama, or piece of music, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it; and yet again I had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. 'Deeper than ever plummit sounded,' I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake; some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives. I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and, at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed--and clasped hands, and heartbreaking partings, and then--everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh, such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death--everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated--everlasting farewells!' O mighty magician!